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Huawei Ascend P1 S and P1 hands-on (updated: video)
Huawei went ahead and made its new line of Ascend phones official at this morning's pre-CES event. The Ascend P1 S and P1 are near identical mobile twins, with 4.3-inch Super AMOLED 960 x 540 displays and are separated only by the former's skinnier profile. At 6.68mm, the P1 S is one millimeter thinner and packs a beefier 1800mAh battery, as compared to its sibling's lesser 1670mAh. Both devices will ship with Google's latest Android flagship Ice Cream Sandwich onboard and run atop a dual-core TI OMAP 4460 Cortex A9 with SGX 540 GPU. No pricing or carrier details have been announced, though the pair are set to launch in April of 2012. We had a chance to get some hands-on time with the phones, so follow on after the break for our initial thoughts.
Droid Bionic benchmark reports PowerVR GPU, new SOC inside?
A very strange thing popped up on mobile graphic benchmarking site NenaMark the other day -- an entry for the Droid Bionic. Now, it would be very easy to fake this test, and you'd be right to be skeptical given the incomplete score and the fact that it's reporting PowerVR's SGX 540 GPU, instead of the Tegra 2 we saw at CES. But, let's not be too hasty -- we heard back in April that NVIDIA's mobile chip wasn't playing nice with Verizon's LTE. Perhaps when Motorola said it was delaying the Bionic to incorporate "several enhancements" it really meant "rebuilding the phone with a more LTE friendly CPU." Both Samsung and Texas Instruments use the SGX 540, and Moto has previously turned to TI's OMAP for the Droid, Droid 2, and Droid X. Then again, a single, suspiciously low benchmark score isn't the most convincing basis for a rumor.
WiFi Galaxy Tab running on an older CPU than its 3G siblings?
If you bought a WiFi-only Galaxy Tab, you probably assumed you were getting the same seven-inch slate that others have been enjoying since November, just without a 3G radio and burdensome two-year contract. Turns out it's worth poring over those specifications on the rear of the packaging. We've yet to get a confirmation from Samsung, but it appears the company swapped out its Hummingbird processor for an older "1GHz Cortex A8" chip with a slower GPU. The Galaxy Tab carriers have been hawking packs a PowerVR SGX 540, but some folks over at the XDA Developers forums have discovered that its WiFi-only sibling is rolling with the previous-gen SGX530. The specs on the Samsung site also lists Bluetooth 2.1 instead of 3.0 -- yet another significant downgrade. We guess the company had to make some trade offs to hit that $350 price point, but we don't have to like it.
Sidekick 4G review
It's been nearly two years since we last reviewed a T-Mobile Sidekick, and it would be a vast understatement to say things have changed. Then, they were designed by Danger and manufactured by Sharp, and were the messaging phone of choice. Today, following fiasco and failure, the Sidekick empire is in ruins. But good ideas and their originators live on, and several of Danger's brightest wound up in Mountain View, California. Danger's Andy Rubin founded Android, design director Mattias Duarte built Honeycomb (after helping craft the Helio Ocean and webOS for Palm) and now, the Sidekick itself has joined its founders in the house that Google built. In many ways, the Sidekick 4G is a return to form, but in an ecosystem filled with similar Android devices, can it stand out from the crowd? %Gallery-122540%
